Eleri Bates is a visual artist living and working in the UK. Currently based at the Yorkshire Artspace Exchange Place Studios. She has at different times been based in Perth, Sheffield, Chesterfield, Leeds and London, as well as travelling internationally for creative projects. Eleri collects images and text from a wide range of sources such as scientific textbooks, literature, and personal visual and textual journaling and works it into a variety of media including painting, printmaking, photography and sculpture.
The catalogue of work is incongruous but for a sense of familial relation between pieces which the artist understands as the handwriting of her concerns running through them. Process and manufacture, in the true sense, compels the creation and whether the viewing elicits a sensation as from a sly wink or like a lingering embrace, the work has a mortality which comes, by definition, from being finished.
Creation, labour, pain.
Creating the work you are the midwife and the mother. You coax and wrestle it out of yourself, losing hours and days in the complete absorption of labour. It doesn’t go to plan, it is its own beast that you see as entirely yours. It has a will of its own, but you are sure you will influence its course.
Topic, image, vision.
Appropriated literature, context shuffling and whispered messages changes meaning and feeling. It is a powerful position to be in, to conceal and reveal what you conceitedly rank in importance. Frivolous and delicious or fossilised and painful you love to look at it. How much beauty to tap into another’s emotions?
Chemistry, knifes, study.
The process and product dictate to and mirror one another. There is nothing like making a mark that you find exceptional, on something, with something. The technical precision and the lust-powered decisions must be clever, heart and head. If you can embrace impulse and cultivate patience, you will always find out more.
People who don’t have paintings just don’t understand.
Eleri Bates 